Lost Among the Living (29 page)

I
t was nearly ten o'clock the next morning when I stood on the front steps of Wych Elm House, getting up my courage to go in. I felt outside myself, like a strange skin had been pulled over the old Jo, the events of the past few days changing me in ways I did not yet recognize or begin to understand. All I knew was that I wore the same dress as the old Jo, the same shoes, the same hat and gloves. There was an ache behind my eyes that I knew came from exhaustion, my bruises hurt, and my legs felt weak, but still I made myself open the door and go through it.

The house smelled of lemon polish and wood underlaid with a harsh, clean smell that I didn't recognize. Here was the familiar umbrella stand, the worn rug. I stood for a moment, as if Frances would show herself to me as I stood there by the front door, waiting for her to appear. When nothing happened, I walked into the corridor.

I passed rooms left as I remembered them. The large parlor, where I had first met Martin, where I had first seen Alex the night of the party. The small parlor, where I had seen Frances sitting in a chair, her head turned to look at me. She was not there now; nor was there any trace of her. I felt as if I were touring a house I had not seen in years, or perhaps only touring it in the depths of my memory, an old woman thinking back to a place I had been.

In the library, I stopped in the doorway, jolted back to the present. Dottie's desk was tidy, her papers stacked, the telephone in its
cradle, her ashtray clean and set perfectly on the front corner. My typewriter under its cover sat at the little table by the window, my chair pulled up beneath it. The shelves of untouched books, the small sofa—all was just as it was supposed to be, yet it had the quality of a museum piece, of strangers putting together a room as they guessed it should look.

I glanced down and noticed that the carpet was different. It had been changed—the old one must have been too soaked with Alex's blood to be saved. I tried to picture a team of servants in here, rearranging the furniture and rolling up the bloodied carpet, but my mind's eye failed me. Alex had been shot here, had staggered to the desk and used the telephone. Someone had dutifully wiped his blood from the receiver.

I backed out of the library and continued down the corridor. My temples were throbbing. Here, on this clean and polished section of floor, was the place where I had fallen, where Robert had kicked me. The skin of my ribs and stomach was still an ugly purple and yellow mix. Here was the place I had lain screaming. I made myself blink and look away.

I passed the doorway to the back stairs, where Dottie had crumpled to the floor, and walked into the morning room. This room, too, was clean, everything put away by strangers. The carpet was new—again, Alex's blood must have ruined the original. Especially in the spot where he had lain, holding on to me, his head in my lap as I waited and waited for the ambulance to come.

I made a choked sound, as if it were all happening again.
It's over,
I tried to remind myself.
It's over. Alex is alive. I just left him at the hospital.
He had woken again that morning, and though he was in pain, we'd sat and talked softly until he'd fallen asleep again. It would take time, but my husband would recover.
He
had not died, not the first time and not the second. I took a breath and inhaled the scent of cleaner again.

“Mrs. Manders?”

I jumped. It was Mrs. Bennett, the housekeeper, standing in the doorway, watching me. Her expression was sympathetic and wary.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't see you there.”

She glanced around the room. “Mr. Wilde had everything cleaned,” she said politely. “There was a team of servants. I supervised putting the rooms back together myself. I hope it's acceptable.”

“Yes,” I stammered. “Yes, of course.”

“How are Mr. Manders and Mrs. Forsyth? Is there any news?”

“They are both recovering,” I replied. “Mrs. Forsyth was out of bed this morning, and her bandages come off this afternoon.”

“That's very good to hear. We're all concerned about her in the servants' quarters. We are anxious for Mrs. Forsyth to come home.”

“I'll let her know you asked.” I did not tell her I suspected that Dottie would not come back here. There was nothing for her here.

Mrs. Bennett said something else, but I didn't hear her. My gaze had caught on a glassed-in cabinet on the wall, displaying some of the house's ubiquitous figurines and objects of art. In the case was a figure of Salome, holding John the Baptist's head in her lap. The figure that Frances had put on my bedside table the day she'd rearranged my bedroom. I had never replaced it, but had kept it in my room.

“Mrs. Bennett,” I said, interrupting whatever she was saying, “how did that figure get into that case?”

She paused, puzzled. “Which figure, Mrs. Manders?”

“The figure of Salome.”

Her gaze followed mine, and she frowned. “That figure has always been there,” she replied.

“Has my room been cleaned?”

She blinked, and I realized I'd spoken almost sharply. “We have changed the sheets as usual, Mrs. Manders, but—”

“Thank you.” I left the morning room—I did not care ever to see it again—and strode to the main staircase, which I climbed briskly, heading for my bedroom.

It was tidy, my clothes placed neatly in the wardrobe. The bed, where I'd sat in my peacock dress talking to Alex, where he'd taken me hurriedly a few days later, where I'd had so many strange dreams and nightmares, was made up like a stranger's. The figurine was gone from the bedside table. I hurried to the table and opened its only drawer, looking for the sketchbook Frances had left under my pillow, which had the photographs folded inside. The drawer was empty. The sketchbook and the photographs were gone.

I pulled open the wardrobe and found the camera tucked inside, on the lowest shelf. I pulled it out and set it on the floor. It had been placed in its leather case; I could not remember putting it away that day after I'd seen Princer in the woods; nor did I know who had put it away for me. I opened the latches and pulled the camera out, expecting to find the inside of the case soaked with water.
There's water running out of it and everything,
Cora had said to me as she'd sat on the floor outside the bathroom door. But there was no water running from the camera now, no water inside the case. I unlatched the camera itself and swung it open, revealing the spools inside, but all of it was dry, unused. There was no film in it.

“Frances?” I said into the still air. There was no answer.

It was all being erased, I thought in a panic as I climbed the stairs to the upper floor. Everything that had happened in this place—it was all being erased as if it had never been. The servants had cleaned; it was their job. But no servant had cleaned the inside of my camera, or put back the figurine Frances had moved. I reached the top of the stairs and went directly into Frances's room.

It was the same as before. The bed with its pretty canopy, the window seat, the patterned rug on the floor—the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old girl, disused because she was away at school perhaps, or was spending a few weeks with friends. I made a beeline for the bookcases, crouching in front of them, reading the spines of the books in the bright, cold, midmorning sunlight that came through the windows. Well-used children's books, books of Christmas stories,
Girl's Own Annual
—all of these were here. But there was no sketchbook, and next to the
World Atlas for Girls
there was no packet of photographs. I looked in the wardrobe, filled with Frances's short lifetime of dresses, and under the bed, but they were not there.

I sat in the rocking chair, staring out the window at the stark branches of the trees. The sketchbook was gone. Robert was gone. Perhaps I truly was as mad as Mother; perhaps I'd wake up one morning, expecting the viscount to come and take me to Budapest or New York. But I found I no longer cared. My mother had loved me the best she could, as much as she could manage. Madness had never stopped that. I understood her better now. I understood what it was like to live in a haze of confusion and fear, and the courage it took to get out of bed every day to face a world that was baffling and sometimes terrifying. I had seen the sketchbook, had awoken with it in my bed. I had touched its pages. I had seen the shadow in the photograph. I had seen Frances in the parlor that day, and watched her pass her bedroom door, and I had seen her in the woods, behind her father's shoulder, warning me—though I had not listened. I had smelled the coppery stench of
Princer as he'd leaped over me, as he'd come through the French doors behind me into the morning room.

Perversely, the thought comforted me.

I thought of a face at the window, begging to come in. I thought of a door, and I wondered whether an exceptional fifteen-year-old girl could go through it, back and forth again.

I would tell Dottie that Frances was gone. If it was a lie, she would never know.

Eventually I rose, letting the chair rock on its own behind me, and went back downstairs to pack my things.

T
hree weeks, later, Robert Forsyth's body washed up on an outcrop of rocks on the shore some seven miles from Wych Elm House. He was identified almost immediately, not only from the scraps of clothes the body was wearing that bore his monogram, but from the fact that his was the most high-profile disappearance in the area in thirty years. Everyone, from the police to the villagers, assumed that Robert Forsyth was dead, but no one knew what exactly had happened.

The body was not a surprise, but it did not solve the mystery. It was in such a degraded condition that the newspapers could not describe it outright, and no cause of death could be precisely determined. The corpse's neck was broken, its limbs torn, though the coroner could not say whether these injuries had happened before or after death. At Dottie's request, the postmortem was done quickly, and then the body was cremated and given to her for disposal. I never knew what she did with the ashes; she certainly did not bury them in the family plot in the Anningley graveyard. I sometimes suspected she dumped them in a trash can, or perhaps down a toilet, though of course she would never tell.

The newspapers reported the finding, of course. The public could not get enough of the tragic story of Wych Elm House's mad patriarch, who had grown so debauched through his wayward ways that he had finally snapped and tried to kill his wife, his nephew, and his niece-in-law. There was no suspicion in the papers about
Frances's
death; she remained a suicide. Only Dottie, Alex, David Wilde, and I knew the truth, and we did not care to share it with the police or the public. There was no point now that Robert was dead, and to claim he had killed his daughter would bring attention dangerously close to the matter of the sketches and the attempted treason. I assumed Colonel Mabry, wherever he was, approved of our silence.

As I'd thought, Dottie did not go back to Wych Elm House. When she was released from the hospital, a bare five days after the tragedy, she had servants bring her a packed bag, and she went directly to London. There, she installed herself in a hotel and helped Cora and her parents nurse Martin through the two surgeries that they all hoped would repair him and bring him back to life. The surgeries were a success, but Martin's recovery was slow, and her weeks in London stretched to months. Eventually, through the offices of David Wilde, she dismissed the servants and closed the house.

Alex and I did not go back, either. I'd packed all of our belongings that day I visited and had them transported to a hotel room I took a few blocks from the hospital, where Alex was still under care. He was there for nearly three weeks, much longer than Dottie, and I made the trip several times a day between my room and the hospital. The nurses doted on him, of course—he was obviously a ward favorite—and through his own natural strength he recovered quickly, though the wound had been serious.

The day they discharged him, I walked him the few blocks to our
hotel and finally had my husband to myself again. I fed him strong tea and roast beef ordered from the kitchen downstairs, then helped him bathe, wash his hair, and shave, both of us in the steamy bathroom for nearly an hour. When that was finished, we did other things. I was worried that it would aggravate his injury, but Alex assured me it was, in fact, the best possible medical therapy, and so I really had no choice at all but to comply.

When he was well enough to travel, we journeyed to London. Christmas had passed with the two of us lazy and cozy in our hotel room, and it was nearly New Year's, the trees lined with frost and the wind icy and damp. Alex drove the motorcar and I sat in the passenger seat as usual, the map in my lap. We stopped frequently for hot tea to warm our blood. We felt rather bohemian, like gypsies living a traveling life, and we did not discuss the fact that we had no permanent home and no certain plans. We talked of politics, the situation on the Continent, and the plays we wanted to see in London. After three years apart, we had an inexhaustible stream of conversation.

Only once did Alex talk to me of what he'd seen that day as he lay on the floor of the morning room in Wych Elm House, looking past my shoulder as I crawled toward him. It was near dawn one morning just before we left for London, and I rolled over in bed to find him propped up on his pillows, wide-awake and thinking.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“I can almost remember it,” Alex said. His arm was angled behind his head, the angry scar of the bullet wound visible on his left shoulder above his heart. He had lost weight in the hospital, and in the dawn light his cheeks were slightly hollowed. “It comes to the edges of my memory, and then it goes away again.”

I pushed myself up on one elbow; I knew immediately what he was talking about. “What did you see?”

He thought about it, and then he shook his head. “It's so unclear,
like I saw it from the corner of my eye. And for some reason it gets mixed up with the war.”

“The war?”

“What I saw there.” His gaze took on a distant look that was hard and cold. “I thought I'd seen everything that could happen to a man, the things he could suffer. But that—that
thing
came through the doors . . .” He rubbed his forehead, as if the memory gave him pain. “It makes my head hurt,” he said finally. “I never really believed you. But you were right about all of it.”

“Stop,” I said to him. “It doesn't matter. It's done.”

It was. But I still felt its shadow even as we sat in the motorcar on the way to London, in the lines on my husband's face, in the way I woke sometimes with cold sweat on my body, my neck aching. The bruises on my body faded, but I remembered how Robert had kicked me, how he'd pushed me that day in the woods, with a rawness that stayed vivid. When we arrived in London, I saw in Dottie an echo of the same rawness in the shadows under her eyes, in the new softness that had entered her manner.

The one who was doing better than all of us, it turned out, was Martin. The surgeries had improved his health dramatically, and though he was still weak in his recovery, he glowed with new life that I hadn't seen in him before. He was shocked and grieving for his father, but in the helpless way of the chronically ill, his own health was topmost in his mind. Marriage agreed with him, as did London. By tacit understanding, none of us told him the truth of Frances's death. That was a conversation, we all believed, for a later time. As for Frances's ghost and Princer, I would never tell him about them at all.

We met with Dottie, Martin, and Cora for supper at the Savoy, where Dottie was staying. Dottie was fully recovered from her injury, sprightly and as tireless as before, wearing her usual severe suit, but I was shocked to see that she'd cut her hair—instead of the usual tightly
wound hairstyle, she now wore it cropped and marcelled within an inch of its life, each curl tidy and placed exactly against her head.

“Dottie,” I teased her as we took our seats around the table. “You told me that bobbed hair was fast.”

“On you it would be,” she replied with the conviction of a woman who has talked herself into being right at all costs. “On me it's merely practical.”

“It looks very modern on you, Mother,” Martin said. He was dressed in his best suit and tie, his hair slicked to a shine. Though he was pale, he had finally managed to gain weight. “I told you that when you got it done.”

“Don't be silly, Martin,” she admonished him, though she dressed down her son in much milder tones than she'd ever used with me. “Tying my hair back while I was recovering caused pain. I couldn't leave it down, so I simply had to cut it.”

“Am I fast?” Cora asked from her seat beside Martin. She was wearing a dress of forest green silk that shimmered in the light. She, too, looked different—happier, perhaps, more confident. “I didn't know, and now that I do, I can't say that I mind.” She cast Martin a look from under her lashes. “Darling, you'll have to remind me which fork to use! You know I'll simply pick the wrong one.”

“Of course,” Martin said, pleased. He turned to Alex. “You look as good as new, Cousin.”

“So do you,” Alex replied. He'd put on his best winter suit, of rich wool in deep blue-gray that matched his eyes. He'd visited the barbershop when we'd arrived in town, and his hair was as short as he'd worn it before the war, his jaw clean-shaven. Even with the faint lines of weariness at the corners of his eyes, I had to force myself not to stare at him.

There was something about Martin's and Cora's happiness, despite all that had happened, that buoyed the mood. Dottie's strained, faraway look relaxed somewhat, and though she was much changed, I
recognized the lightness of her mood as the same one she'd had when we'd traveled Europe. There was something about being in London, about sitting in the Savoy with a pleased pair of newlyweds, ordering champagne, that let us all forget for a little while, that kept the shadows and the memories at bay.

“I suppose this is as good a time as any,” Dottie said as dessert was served. “I'm selling the house.”

There was a moment of silence around the table. Cora's eyes went as wide as Clara Bow's.

“That's a bit of a shock,” Martin said at last.

“Nonsense.” Dottie tried for her old tone, though she missed the mark. She patted her pockets for her cigarette holder, then changed her mind, perhaps not wishing to disturb the other diners at the Savoy. “Everyone is gone now, and I'd be there alone. I'll take a flat in London. The house will be packed and empty by Easter, and I'll travel the Continent again.” She darted a glance at me. “Perhaps I'll find myself a new companion.”

“What about the art?” I asked her.

“Don't worry, Manders. I'll find buyers. And I may acquire more when I travel again. I have an excellent eye.”

“I don't know, Mother.” Martin sounded doubtful.

“Oh, no, darling,” Cora said. “It will be an adventure for her.”

Surprisingly, Dottie looked at me. “What do you think?”

There was just the faintest quaver in her voice. Alex was quiet next to me, but I already knew he agreed with what I was about to say. “I think it sounds wonderful,” I told her softly.

“You were always a maudlin girl,” Dottie said, looking away.

“Yes, Dottie,” I said, and we turned back to the others and did not speak of it again.